Colossal Ego vs Self-Awareness

If there is one sure thing in the world of development, it is that Ego’s exist. They are there because what we do is so often in the "magic" realm. This is a perception from society, that whether right or wrong, exists. It doesn’t matter that a Farmer battling 12 years of drought who manages to get through to the next harvest is just as miraculous as coding the engine for Unreal Tournament.

We are seen as nerds. "Supa" nerds if you will.

And for me, that’s okay. I’m kind of a pseudo-nerd anyway.

Who are we? What do we wish to accomplish? How much bragging can we do? How much competiton should there be between programmers?

It all begins and ends with our own self.

Instead of babbling some more, I’ll get straight to the point.

We all know someone who thinks they are pretty awesome at what they do. We all know someone who thinks they will always be more right than us in any particular situation. We know that we ourselves can be this person.

And truthfully, we know that most of that crap is just being insecure. Security of Self leads to a far better understanding of our work. We can get on with learning without being hampered by petty fights and jealousy.

Sure, it’s gonna happen. And sure, competition is an awesome tool. But most of the time I never see healthy competition, I see insecurity rearing it’s head, creating wierd social situations and complex mind-warfare. Why is this? Because of half a hundred reasons I expect, some of them from my own personal insecurity experiences.

But it’s not the why here that matters. It’s how we react.

Back to the main point. Having an ego is fine and dandy. Never being able to be told you’re wrong, or admitting you’re wrong, or turning around and changing what you’re done … that’s where the stick gets stuck. You become a far better programmer, designer, developer if you are willing to learn, to admit you need to learn, to seek out better ways of doing things.

For me, after the shock of seeing that i was, in fact, wrong :), i never really think of it so much as being told i was wrong, as that there is a better way to do it. And that’s what I want. I don’t care that what I did before was crap, i know it was. I look back on old code all the time and curl up in the foetal position.

To realise the vision of Dev Dawn, some of these concepts need to be laid out in plain sight. A place of Ideas is only going to break down if we can never learn new things, or know we can improve.

So there’s another of my rambling 2.3 cent articles. It’s left-field, coming at some things that we talk about over coffee.